Saturday, February 11, 2017

Losing Hope in U.S., Migrants Make Icy Crossing to Canada

The road to asylum. The highway from Emerson, Canada, to Winnipeg, where many migrants go to seek refugee status.CreditAaron Vincent Elkaim for The New York Times

WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Almost three months after Bashir Yussuf watched Donald J. Trump win the presidential election, he made his way to Noyes, Minn., where he set off at night into the snow-filled woods and crawled across the unmarked border into Canada.

“I saw what was coming,” said Mr. Yussef, 28, who fled his home in Somalia in 2013 to make a circuitous, five-month voyage to San Diego, where he applied for asylum but was rejected. “I knew Trump was going to deport me.”

After a three-hour walk, much of it through deep drifts, Mr. Yussuf arrived in Emerson, a small farming town in sight of the snow-swept border with both North Dakota and Minnesota.

Emerson’s 700 inhabitants have long known “border hoppers,” often offering them lifts to the nearby Canadian Border Services Agency office. But they have never seen them coming in these numbers.

The morning before Mr. Yussuf arrived with another Somali last Sunday night, 19 other Africans had emerged on the Canadian side of the border, cold and hungry after walking much of the night across frozen farm fields. There were too many to fit into the small border office for processing, so the people of the town rushed to open the community hall, where the new arrivals could get warm, doze on sleeping mats and refuel on Nutella sandwiches, tea and coffee.

Noting a worrying trend, Emerson officials convened an emergency meeting on Thursday with the police and border agents to figure out a protocol for the next wave of arrivals — which they feared would be soon.

“The farmers are worried about what they’re going to find when the snow melts,” said Greg Janzen, the reeve, or chief elected executive, of the Emerson-Franklin municipality.

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Bashir Yussuf fled Somalia in 2013, making it to the United States. After Donald J. Trump won the White House, Mr. Yussuf decided it was time to flee again. “I saw what was coming,” he said.CreditAaron Vincent Elkaim for The New York Times

On Christmas Eve, two Ghanaians were picked up on the roadside north of town, some 10 hours after they had set off into a field near the border, sinking to their waists in snow. The temperature that morning was reported to be below zero, with windchill making it even worse. The men’s hands were so badly frostbitten that they lost almost all their fingers.

Over the past couple of years, a small number of people have been sneaking across the border at Manitoba from the United States and then filing for asylum, Canadian Border Service Agency statistics show. But since the fall, refugee workers in Winnipeg say, there has been a noticeable surge.

While the government of Canada was unable to provide statistics on the number of people seeking refugee status who illegally enter the country, Sgt. Harold Pfleiderer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said “there has been an increase in illegal migration in Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, with the largest increase being seen in Quebec.”

A loophole in the rules covering asylum seekers has led some to walk for as long as eight hours in the middle of the night, through wintry landscapes and biting prairie cold, before arriving in Emerson. While an agreement between Canada and the United States makes it impossible for them to simply present themselves at the border and claim asylum, those who make it into the country and then present themselves to border guards can do so.

Now, in light of the uncertainty and disruption created by President Trump’s executive order on immigration, refugee advocates and human rights groups in Canada are demanding that the government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suspend or cancel the refugee pact, which is known as the Safe Third Country agreement.

“We are essentially encouraging people to come across the border through irregular means,” said Sean Rehaag, a York University law professor who specializes in refugee and immigration law.

On Wednesday, the immigration and refugee clinical program at Harvard Law School issued a report stating that Mr. Trump’s executive orders on immigration made the United States “not a safe country of asylum” for people fleeing persecution and violence.

“When Canada sends someone back to the U.S., we are saying we have confidence the U.S. is going to protect them if they need protection. We don’t see how we can have confidence to say that in the current context,” said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council For Refugees, a nonprofit umbrella organization of 170 refugee advocacy groups.

Bashir Khan, a Winnipeg lawyer, has represented 125 refugees before the Immigration and Refugee Board over the past five years. That is on top of the 17 he is representing currently. All were rejected at refugee hearings in the United States.

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“Let’s be honest here,” Mr. Khan said. “They did not get access to justice in the United States. They were locked up from the moment they crossed the Mexican border, and detained an average of nine months. They didn’t know how to fill out asylum forms, they were not given legal aid — not one of them.”

Ms. Chahal of Welcome Place said that in recent months her center had seen another type of applicant — people like Mourad Hassan, who flew into Chicago in December and then worked immediately to find a way across the border to make his first asylum claim in Canada.

“When Trump became president, I was scared he would deport me,” said Mr. Hassan, 32, a former army officer from Djibouti who said he had been tortured for political reasons. “He doesn’t like Muslims.”

From Emerson, the refugee applicants typically take cabs for the 70-mile trip to the provincial capital of Winnipeg, where they formally apply for asylum, welfare checks and legal aid. The hearings are usually scheduled within two to three months of their application, but there are no guarantees. In 2015 the Immigration and Refugee Board approved 57.7 percent of the 16,521 refugee claims made inside Canada’s borders. The quasi-judicial board does not track how many claims come from people who bypassed border controls to enter Canada.

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Jean Pierre Venegas, center and Fadel Al-Shawwa, left, of the Manitoba Interfaith Immigration Council spoke with the Emerson Municipal Emergency coordinator, Bill Spanjer, about housing refugees.CreditAaron Vincent Elkaim for The New York Times

With the legal status of Mr. Trump’s executive order still in limbo, Canada’s government has shown no enthusiasm for suspending its agreement with Washington.

On Friday, Camielle Edwards, a spokeswoman for Ahmed Hussen, the immigration minister, said that the agreement “remains an important tool for Canada and the U.S. to work together on the orderly handling of refugee claims made in our countries.” She said, “The conditions of the agreement continue to be met, but we are continuing to monitor the situation closely.”

Ms. Dench said that history suggests that Canada’s border will not be overwhelmed by refugee claimants if people entering from the United States are allowed to apply at the border. “It’s not as if everyone in the U.S. would suddenly want to come to Canada,” she said. And, she said, “We would not have more people crossing the border irregularly and you no longer have people losing their fingers.”

Mr. Yussuf was prepared for his journey to Emerson. He wore thermal underwear and thick gloves. And he paid a guide $600 to take him close to the border.

Other asylum seekers said that they had heard from cabdrivers in Grand Forks, N.D., that they would be deported at the border. The drivers offered to drive them to a place that was better for crossing illegally, but farther from the border.

They were unprepared for the wintry crossing. One man, Zurekaneni Issah Adams, wore a thin jean jacket and carpentry gloves. His trip took seven hours.

“We were lucky. We were saved by God,” said Mr. Adams, 36, who fled Ghana in 2014 for Brazil, before slowly making his way by foot, bus and boat to the California border.

After 16 months in detention, Mr. Adams said, his asylum request there was rejected. In Canada, he had a hearing scheduled last week, but it was postponed.

A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2017, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Losing Hope in U.S., Refugees Make Icy Trek to Canada. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe